• Taking a keen interest in caring for feral cats, photographer Sandy Carson set out to document the people and processes related to TNR (Trap-Neuter-Return). “You don’t have to be a crazy ‘cat person’ to be a certified trapper,” he assures, “but cat attire is optional.”

• Here’s 4 minutes 33 seconds worth of clips of a non-speaking Nicholas Cage in which only ambient noises are audible. Created by Adam Lucas, Cage Does Cage is an homage to John Cage’s 1952 conceptual art piece 4‘33”, performed by the Ghostrider star.

• April 21 is Record Store Day, a great chance to support some of America’s 700 independently owned bricks-and-mortar records stores — and a fine excuse for us to point out one of Christian Marclay’s “Body Mix” collages.

• A new edition of Lewis Carroll’s surreal fable Alice in Wonderland is, aptly, designed by an artist known for creating mind-bending visual worlds. Penguin Global has just published a Yayoi Kusama-designed version of the 1865 tale.

• Craig Finn, who headlines Rock the Garden 2012 with the Hold Steady, got dudded up in the desert for a photoshoot as part of the Esquire Songwriting Challenge, in which he and four others each wrote a song, on the spot, inspired by the phrase “Pacific Standard Time.”

• “Our 1,000 artworks are headed for destruction anyway because of the government’s indifference,” says Antonio Manfredi, director of Italy’s Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, who says he’s begun burning paintings in protest of cuts in arts funding.

• Pedro Reyes follows his 2011 Walker exhibition Baby Marx with Rompecabezas, a show in Mexico City that includes his adjustable hand-shaped chairs. “Functional and comfortable, you can use it to communicate to the people you live with,” he says.

• All art installation shots all the time. This dedicated Tumblr site chronicles art handlers–including Walker staffers installing Jim Hodges’ gigantic boulder/sculptures and Robert Therrien’s mammoth folding chairs–doing their thing.

• The Walker took home two prizes at the 2012 Museums & the Web conference, held in San Diego over the weekend, including Most Innovative and Best Overall. Congratulations to the Walker web and design teams, and to all 2012 winners! (We’re getting drubbed, but you can still vote for the Walker in the People’s Voice section of the Webby Awards.)

• Want more links like this? Follow Art News From Elsewhere on the Walker homepage.

• We’re up for a Webby! The nominees list for the 2012 Webby People’s Voice Awards—honoring the best of the web—has just been released, and the Walker’s “gamechanging” new website makes the cut, in the category of best art site. Voting is open to the public through April 26.

• “A casual treatment of death is central to Mexican cultural identity,” writes Julia Cooke, who cites designer products made out of grenades or gunmetal. Only a few, though—like Pedro Reyes’ shovels made from melted-down gang handguns—move beyond glib one-liners.

• After being slapped with a 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) penalty for alleged tax-law violations, Ai Weiwei is suing Chinese authorities. He argues that the fine for tax evasion was unlawful, as he wasn’t given access to witnesses or evidence used against him.

• For their first solo show in London, art provocateurs Eva and Franco Mattes—aka 0100101110101101.org—present a show with a title that changes daily and offers a display of works the duo claims includes fragments stolen from masterworks by Duchamp, Warhol, and others. “A lot of the works were so crazy, strong and powerful when they were made, like Duchamp’s Fountain, but became so accepted and it was like energy had been sucked out of them by being put in a museum,” the pair said. “The work maybe dies a little bit. We consider what we did a tribute to these artists – it is like a medieval relic, you keep it because you want to protect it and preserve it. We were acting out of faith, not anger.”

• There’s nothing like Minneapolis’ Minnehaha Falls in springtime, writes Andy Sturdevant, who shares a photo from an 1983 visit there by Jorge Luis Borges. Wrote the late Argentine poet:

The wry mythology of the Wisconsin and Minnesota lumber camps includes remarkable creatures – creatures that no one, surely, has ever believed in. The Pinnacle Grouse had just one wing, so it could only fly in one direction, and it flew around one particular mountain day and night. The color of its plumage would change depending on the season and the condition of the observer.

• While last Friday’s Cat Break showed us LOLcat/architecture mashups, today’s demonstrates that wacky cat photography predate the internet by a century and a half: “Probably the progenitor of shameless cat pictures was English photog Harry Pointer (1822-1889), who snapped approximately 200 photos of his perplexed albeit jovial ‘Brighton Cats.’”

• Damien Hirst’s sculpture Hymn, installed outside Tate Modern, was tagged with the word “Occupy” after a writer at The Occupied Times of London identified him as “the man who has defined the capitalist approach to art more than any other.” Kester Brewin writes:

Sharks. Death. Love. God. Money. If Hirst is anything, he is the brash Goldman Sachs of the art world. He has a vast personal fortune of over £200m, accumulated through an alchemy that would leave even the most brash bankers in awe: stock medicine cabinets, spots of paint, flies, butterflies and severed cows heads transformed into pieces that sell for millions.

• Want more links like this? Follow Art News From Elsewhere on the Walker homepage.

• After being disqualified from his own presidential run, singer Youssou Ndour finds himself in politics nonetheless: He’s been named Senegal’s new minister for culture and tourism. The Grammy winner is part of new president Macky Sall’s cabinet.

• Andrew Bird, Laurie Anderson, and Amadou & Mariam are among artists invited to perform in A Room For London, a small “boat” overlooking the Thames. Winning a design contest, Fiona Banner’s proposal is based on the boat Joseph Conrad captained in the Congo in 1890.

• The “Contact & News” page of Richard Prince’s website has turned into a blog, of sorts. The artist has been musing since March on topics from his reading recommendations (Mary’s Mosaic by Peter Janney) to hairy women to his wonderment about Victor Hugo’s real name.

• For former urban planner Kathryn Clark, charts and statistics on foreclosures fail to convey the hardship so many families are facing. Her Foreclosure Quilts are delicate fabric collages that tell the story of our fraying neighborhoods.

• When proofing the reproductions of art in the catalog for its forthcoming Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, the Art Institute of Chicago had some help: the artist’s foundation lent “color swatches made from the very paints Lichtenstein used throughout his career.”

• A new single-theme Tumblr by Jason Foumberg aims to catalog the last works made by famous artists. A few poetic inclusions: Keith Haring‘s Unfinished Painting of 1989, Paul Thek‘s Dust (1988), and Basquiat‘s 1988 work Riding with Death.

• Ai Weiwei, who once carved a security camera in marble for an art project, one-upped himself this week: in a nod to China’s ever-present surveillance system, he set up cameras to live-stream all the activity in his studio. It didn’t last long: the next day, authorities told him to pull the plugs.

• On Sunday, Philadelphia announced it’d be the first American city to create “E-Lanes,” delineated Electronic Device Lanes reserved for those who chronically walk and text. John Metcalfe dubs it one of 2012′s best April Fool’s joke by a US city.

• Cat Break: Cats + architecture = Internet gold. Here’s a Tumblr blog that pairs reader-submitted mashups of famous architecture—including Snøhetta’s Opera House in Oslo and Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House—and cats.

• Want more links like this? Follow Art News From Elsewhere on the Walker homepage.